Nico Muhly to premiere new opera at ENO

The musical toast of New York, 28-year-old American composer Nico Muhly - who has worked with Björk and Antony Hegarty, and is a protegé of Philip Glass - is to premiere his opera, Two Boys, at English National Opera in 2011. About a young boy who takes on the personality of a middle-aged woman on the internet, its subject is, he says, "violent sexuality".

We look forward to this event keenly, not least because a recent pair of premieres at the Barbican earned him such very, very bad reviews. Our own Andrew Clements remarked that though Muhly was "flavour of the month" in New York, the pieces "gave no hint of what all the fuss might be about"; for the Telegraph, meanwhile, they were like "slow, painful death". But what we already love about Muhly is his splendidly game urge to fight back. On his blog, he writes: "I have never seen 'flavour of the month' spelled in that way and am secretly thrilled to be dismissed in such a fashioun [sic]"; he also refers to "cunty English reviews". At this rate, he'll be in for some more, so I look forward to the prose equivalent of composer/critic naked mud wrestling the year after next.